Botany

A branch of biology, botany is the scientific study of plant life. It is sometimes known as plant science(s), plant biology, or phytology. Plant biologists, physicists, and botanists are all examples of scientists who are experts in their respective fields. It is believed that the name "botany" derives from the Ancient Greek word v (botan), which may be translated as "pasture", "herbs," "grass," or "fodder." The phrase "botany" is derived from the Greek verb b (boskein), which means "to feed or graze." Botany has traditionally encompassed the study of fungus and algae by mycologists and phycologists, with the study of these three categories of organisms staying within the scope of the International Botanical Congress's field of interest. In the modern era, botanists (in the strict sense of the word) study approximately 410,000 species of land plants, of which approximately 391,000 species are vascular plants (including approximately 369,000 species of flowering plants) and approximately 20,000 species are bryophytes. Vascular plants include nearly 369,000 species of plants.

Botany began as herbalism in prehistory, with early people attempting to identify – and subsequently produce – food, medicinal, and toxic plants. As a result, it is one of the oldest fields of science, dating back to the attempts of early humans to identify edible, medicinal, and deadly plants. Medically significant plants were grown in mediaeval physic gardens, which were commonly associated to monasteries. Their botanical gardens served as forerunners of the first university-affiliated botanical gardens, which were established as early as the 1540s. The Padua botanical garden was one of the very first. It was possible to do plant research in these gardens. These early efforts to categorise and explain their collections were the origins of plant taxonomy, which culminated in the publication of Carl Linnaeus' binomial system of nomenclature in 1753, which is still in use today for the naming of all living organisms.

A variety of new techniques for the study of plants were developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including methods of optical microscopy and live cell imaging, electron microscopy, the analysis of chromosome number, plant chemistry, the structure and function of enzymes and other proteins. Botanists used molecular genetic tools such as genomics and proteomics, as well as DNA sequences, to improve the accuracy with which they classified plants in the latter two decades of the twentieth century.